2011 Hertford College Magazine (Issue 91)

Hertford undergraduates and
teachers past and present
(Re-)creating La Bohème
Robin Norton Hale (English, 1999)
In March this year at the Theatre Royal
Drury Lane, when Alfie Boe opened the
envelope to announce the winner of the Olivier
Award for Best Opera, I hadn’t considered
for a moment that ‘La Bohème by
OperaUpClose’ would be the next words
out of his mouth. Given that I was sat in
the stalls as the director of one of the four
nominated shows, this may sound disingenuous.
But I’d taken into account the fact
that the other three were a sumptuous production
at the Royal Opera House, a cutting-edge
one at ENO, and a collaboration
between ENO and the Young Vic, whereas
my production started in a 35-seat function
room above a dodgy pub in Kilburn.
I still couldn’t believe I was there at all.
How I came to direct La Bohème, and
ultimately end up stammering out an acceptance
speech at the Oliviers, was a series
of fortunate accidents and a few leaps
of faith. I read English at Hertford and
graduated in 2002, without an impressive
internship or job lined up (many of my fellow
English graduates were equally un-career-minded,
just having a vague idea that
we ‘wanted to write’). Not knowing how
else to achieve this, I enrolled on a journalism
course, where I learned that news
journalism was not really about writing at
all. Being back in London meant I properly
discovered the theatre scene here for the
first time, and thought that maybe I could
combine the fact that I was going to the
theatre twice a week with writing - I would
be a theatre critic. In the meantime, I needed
to earn some money, and was incredibly
lucky to wing my way into a job at English
Touring Opera as Marketing and Press Of-
HERTFORD COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Hertford past and present: Re-creating La Bohème
(Photo: Adam Levy)
ficer using my journalism qualification and
a dormant half-knowledge of opera (my dad
used to take me when I was little, when he
couldn’t persuade my mum to go with him).
I worked at ETO for nearly four years,
re-discovering opera as a grown-up, and
still going to the theatre all the time. During
that time, I developed a healthy suspicion
of critics and began to wonder if
maybe I’d like to be part of creating productions
rather than passing judgement
on them. With no ulterior motive, I mentioned
this to my boss, the artistic director
of ETO, who relieved me of my marketing
duties for a few weeks so I could be his
asistant director - a generous gesture as at
that stage I was much more use as a press
15.